First off, apologies for ignoring the site as of late. Today’s excuse is that I’m currently in the honeymoon phase with a new PC, and the marriage is good. It’s surprising to me that right now, all it takes is about a thousand dollars to put together an awesome gaming rig. And yes, a thousand dollars is a lot of money, but I maintain that if you were to buy a PS3 and then a television good enough to actually show you what the games look like, then you’re looking at about the same amount of cash. It may be said that money is the problem, but I think the difficulty people really have is willingness and ability to take on a project like building a PC, setting it up, and then maintaining it. It takes a lot of knowledge and experience to do it right, so I definitely understand the reticence. All I hear, though, is that it costs too much money.
But I digress. The real reason for me being here now is that I wanted to say a few quick blurbs about all the PC games I’ve been playing lately. Being able to see Crysis with everything set to max and still getting something that could be called a “framerate” is incredible, so it’s been a veritable feeding frenzy with this new machine. Across the past week, I’ve been testing out damn near every game I’ve bought in the past 18 months. And to that end, Crysis still stands out on top as the best-looking game out there. Question: Why did Call of Duty 4 win the graphics darling award at E3 2007 again? Oh, right, because it was the newest in a respected series of console shooters, and the vast majority of gaming press loves to ignore the PC as a gaming platform.
Haaaaaaaaaate.
Anyway, here’s a few blurbs about what I’ve been playing lately in no particular order:
Dead Space: I’ve already been through this game on PS3, and I loved it there. Playing it again on PC is just reminding me of why I loved it so much. It’s fairly well-known that I think the best game ever made is System Shock 2, and I think that’s the reason why I don’t get blown away like everyone else by most games these days. In my mind, they have to be better than SS2 to get me really excited, and so far, nothing has been. That said, I think if Dead Space had a little more RPG in it, it would have had a shot. As it is, it’s damn close. As far as I’m concerned, everything Dead Space does, it does right. The atmosphere, the pacing, the sound (oh my god, the sound) is just perfect. This is as good as monster-based horror gets, frankly. As I played, I kept thinking that I’d love to do a special presentation on Halloween in someone’s living room. Set up my PC, hook the audio into a nice 5.1 system, and play through the whole game in a dark room with a captive audience. It’d be a fantastic way to sink into the world and have a scary-good time. Ah, dreams.
P.S. Fuck you, EA, for lowing the price on Steam to $39.99 from $49.99 the day after I buy it. Why? Your other items in the recently-released-for-console-but-now-on-PC bin like Mirror’s Edge are still fifty bucks. Rarr!
Prince of Persia: Y’know, I loved the last Prince of Persia trilogy. Yes, even Warrior Within. Actually, especially Warrior Within. I have this weird “problem” where I tend to love the black sheep of a series, because I appreciate it for being daring and different whereas it sounds like most people resist those changes. Whatever the case, I think perhaps now I can understand people hating changes when I play this game. Besides the annoyance of the characters saying “Fur-tyle” Grounds all the time, the platforming feels completely wonky and bad. I understand that the game is based on the Assassin’s Creed engine, and the weird thing about that is that Assassin’s Creed’s platforming felt great, but here, the controls fight me every step of the way. You’re not so much controlling things as you are directing a series of canned animations, and since they are canned (and thus don’t respond to you), the feedback you get as the player is misleading. I find myself pressing the wrong buttons all the time because my guy just doesn’t move the way I expect him to, or the way he seemed to the last time I tried it. And what’s up with triggering all that extra dialogue that, hey, maybe I want to hear, but maybe I don’t want to stand around for five minutes listening to. Why couldn’t they talk while I walk around or something? Aggravating.
Crysis Warhead: This game, as an overall package, is better than Crysis. However, this meant shaving off both the lows and the highs of the original game. The first third of the game is pure Crysis magic, with the nonlinear environments and cool scenarios made fun all over again with the addition of the cool nanosuit powers. Aaaand then, it becomes a series of linear setpieces, where you are shuttled along a path to enemy compound after enemy compound that I could infiltrate and subdue in the same exact way every time. It felt incredibly repetitive, and I realized that when I was wishing for a little more indoor stuff in the first game, I was actually kidding and would beg the developers to not do that again please. Or at least, don’t do them like “series of straight hallways with stuff in them = fun!” The other head-scratcher is that even though you play as a character who showed up every now and then in Crysis, you don’t do anything that he did in that game, and instead do all kinds of things that he didn’t. I thought the story was supposed to be running parallel, and that you’d meet up with Nomad every now and then as seen in Crysis. You don’t. Also: dramatic scene near the end of the game was unexpected, but actually quite good. The cynic in me wonders how many people laughed at it because they’re unable to handle a serious moment in what is otherwise a summer action flick-type game.
Grand Theft Auto IV: Ah yes, the new granddaddy of system-taxing games. Even though I’ve got a system with the best Radeon 4870 money can buy, four gigs of RAM and a quad-core 2.5 GHz AMD CPU, I still hesitated purchasing this game given all I’ve heard about single-digit framerates for people with six CPUs and twelve video cards and nine terabytes of RAM. The hyperbole of that last sentence matches the hyperbole of how much system you need to run this game. Everything is set at maximum on my system, except the various detail distance sliders, but since everything is already way beyond what either console can do, I’m satisfied. And you know what? It runs just dandy. However, the game in general is less dandy, and I feel the same way now as I did when playing it on the PS3. The experience I get out of it is a surreal one, where it’s amazing to watch this game and see all that that a hundred million dollars and who-knows-how-many years of work can do, and yet still come up with a game that is the exact same thing as the previous games. You still just drive around, shoot people, and watch cutscenes of your character acting like an asshole. The only difference is, this time you’re not playing an asshole from America. He may as well be though, as the only thing that motivates him is money. In the first ten hours, I killed two different people, both of whom I had done terrible things for, and only because someone paid me to do it. I can’t sympathize with anything my character goes through, because he’s so clearly a sociopath whose only evident motivation is money. The guy from GTA III had no personality, so there was nothing to identify with. Tommy Vercetti in GTA: Vice City was only taking out other assholes, and never pretended to be anything but a gangster, so no problem there. And Carl from GTA: San Andreas? I just couldn’t reconcile the story of avenging his mum with the story of destroying a supertanker while flying around with a jetpack. What the hell was up with that?
Anyway, all that said, GTA IV is still a lot of fun. I just wish that Rockstar would do something more with this. I’m tired of playing a jerk, and I’m sick of all the stereotypes and the “gay people as punchline” writing that has infected so much of popular comedy lately. The best idea I’d heard for solving this problem was on GFW Radio, where someone imagined how cool it would have been if the second half of the game had done something totally unexpected and awesome with its otherwise formulaic setup. What if the city was subjected to a natural disaster of some kind, or even better, became ground zero for the zombie apocalypse? A game that plays like GTA but has the sense and styling of 28 Weeks Later would be incredible. Rounding up survivors, hiding out in buildings, scrounging up resources in broken-down shopping centers, and then eventually escaping the city — It’d be like Dead Rising, except even bigger in scale. Oh, and fun.
Stranglehold: This game is just a freaking blast. It’s a shame the storyline is complete ass, and oh, that the PC version is 12.6 goddamn gigs (and therefore comes on two dual-layer DVDs) just because the developers didn’t feel like reprogramming shaders used only during cutscenes. Instead, you get to fill your hard drive with gigs of 720p video of lame story you don’t even want to see. ‘hem. Rest of the game is awesome, though. Setting the difficulty to “Casual” (hey, screw you Midway) frees you to go through the game as fast as you want, causing tons of mayhem and seeing the incredible setpieces go up in a storm of particles. Y’know, what they said it was going to be like. Some parts are complete garbage (running around attaching bombs to things = not fun) and others are just rooms to blast away bad guys (taking out three guys with a shotgun blast that also destroys a poker machine, causing sparks, coins, and blood to spray everywhere = fun) but overall, it’s just plain awesome. You don’t even need a PC like mine to play this at the highest settings. My last system, running on AGP for cryin’ out loud, got me through the whole game on the highest settings just dandy. That’s the Unreal Engine for ya. Just don’t think that because it plays a bit like Max Payne means that it’s actually going to have a great story like Max Payne.
Fallout 3: Yeah, I already played through this game once, but I thought I’d give it another spin with what I know now and not spend perks on leveling up even faster than you do already. That level cap is just a complete buzzkill for me. If I’m not progressing, then fighting enemies is just a chore. I’m gonna try and level up as sloooow as possible this second time through. Anecdote: After just emerging from the Vault and heading over to Megaton, I saved my game thinking I was going to head to bed. But, just for fun, I thought I’d see how far I could get killing random people in the town at level 2. Result? Everyone in Megaton died. I killed everyone in the first major city, all by myself, at level 2. Wow. I guess having all that experience of the game’s mechanics helped more than I thought. Oh, and the game is clearly leveling itself along with me (Oblivion says hi!) and yet people don’t complain about it here. Silly people.
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Uhm. I’m pretty sure this game is a fan mod of Half-Life 2. Except that I paid for it. And it didn’t actually have the possibility of being good. And I am an idiot.
Space Siege: Tickets for the most banal, boring, soulless, developers-gave-up-on-this-game game of all time are available on Steam for the low, low price of $19.99. Yes, I’m actually playing this to keep me occupied (dare I say, “satisfied”?) until Diablo III comes out. No, it’s not working. But hey, it does satisfy my curiosity about whether Gas Powered Games is continuing its fine tradition of creating the most phlegmatic-but-technically-apt games for PC. They are the hot button studio for games like that, so if you like burning your finger (as I do, on occasion), press away.
Devil May Cry 4: All I know about you is that I got the perfect score when doing your benchmark, earning me my coveted S ranking and the game telling me that only now will I get the real Devil May Cry 4 experience. A thousand dollar PC is all it took to get this game running at a constant 60 FPS no matter how many enemies are on screen. I am satisfied. Now, to actually beat this game that I’ve had for a year.
GRID: Best racing game of 2008? Probably. I would also file it under the “Most Motherfuckery in a Game in 2008″ category. Why? Well, I think they decided that since they’ve given you the (totally awesome) ability to rewind and undo a mistake, that provides the mandate for making it the hardest frigging racing game of all time. I played through most of DiRT on the second-to-hardest setting with little trouble, but I can’t get past the first freakin’ tier of races in this game without putting it on baby mode, and then it’s so easy that I blast past everyone in the first five seconds and never see them again. Balanced? I think not. Oh, and the inability for anyone without an Xbox 360 controller to use the replay function to its fullest (like being able to throttle the playback speed or just rotate the camera) was a nice little bonus “screw you.”
Kane and Lynch – Dead Men: Continuing my tradition of really enjoying games that everyone hates, I really enjoyed this game. It’s a perfect example of playing an asshole that has redeeming qualities, and even manages to be sympathetic. You’re forced to do terrible things, but they are pitched to the character, and to me by extension, in a way that makes sense. These things aren’t right, but it’s arguable about whether it could be avoided given the circumstances and one’s own natural compulsion to survive. This game pulls no punches, shows you what most stories are afraid to, and lets you make an actual, meaningful decision or two. More than once, I had to stop and think about what I had been doing, and that’s more than I can say for pretty much every game I play. The presentation and the acting (especially the acting — some of the finest ever heard in the history of the medium) sell the whole package, and I eagerly bought it. One thing about the graphics – After finishing it, I realized that in the same way that Crysis is trying to emulate reality with its look, Kane and Lynch is trying to emulate what a movie looks like. A critical distinction, but once you see the special effects in Crysis and then compare them to the special effects in Kane and Lynch, you should be able to see what I’m talking about. One is meant to emulate what a person’s eyes would see, and the other is meant to emulate what a camera’s lens would see. That is what makes Kane and Lynch an incredible cinematic experience, and therefore, an amazing achievement for video games.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky: Why do you run worse than Crysis? Like, unplayably worse? Well, whatever. I’ll get back to you later.
And that about sums up what I played this past week.
…
Holy shit.
January 19th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
I’m in the middle of Dark Messiah and enjoying it. I love being to use the environment and kicking people off my sword after I run them through makes me giddy.
Are you running Clear Sky in DX10? I had a lot of trouble with it until I turned all the insane lighting effects down. They were pretty though, so pretty that it corrupted the way I think. Now I keep referring to sunlight as “God Rays”…
January 19th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
I was indeed running Clear Sky in DX10 mode. I took off AA and slightly reduced one or two other things, and now I’ve got it in a state where it runs fine. Now all I need is the will to play it. ;)
January 26th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Again, you fail to include Darker in your smörgåsbord! Actually, I feel completely caught up now in the games of 2008 – thank you =)
February 6th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
I still do and always will disagree with you on GTA IV’s story and main character, but yeah, the comedy SUCKS in that game. Good lord. It’s getting old.
Anyway, good article and all. Like I even need to tell you that anymore. =D